Several episodes reveal the history behind the family’s stately house, which was built by the Whitshank patriarch, Junior. The novel’s structure is nonlinear, and chapters travel back and forth in time, following different characters in different generations. If Red’s particular understanding of modern reflects his obsessive focus on his contracting business, each of the Whitshanks turns out to have made assumptions about the others based on quirks of personality and perspective, all of which are exploded before the novel’s ending. Why, my folks lived long enough to see aluminum-frame window screens, and clip-on fake mullions and flush doors and fiberglass bathtubs.” Modern times! We’d sent men into space by then.
And it all seems so long ago, although truth to tell it was only back in the sixties. As Red looks back on some of the losses he’s suffered, he notes ruefully, “I feel like it sort of slipped by me.
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